Class of 1984

Class Correspondent

Tamar Schwartz Eisen reports that she’s back in Boston for the spring semester. She is teaching a course on legal reasoning, research and writing as a visiting professor at Boston College Law School. Since 2005, she has taught and directed the first-year lawyering skills program at the University of Richmond School of Law. Scott Sokol is the new rabbi at Temple Emanuel of Marlborough, the only synagogue in that central Massachusetts city. He is also a professor of psychology, Jewish education and Jewish music at Hebrew College, teaching liturgy, life-cycle officiating, and prayer chant to rabbinical and cantorial students. Scott is a licensed psychologist and co-founder of Koleinu: Boston’s Jewish Community Chorus and Sheminiyah, a professional octet of cantors. David Goodtree served as co-chair of the Water Innovation Mission, which brought leading water innovation researchers and entrepreneurs from the Boston area to Israel to learn about the country’s much-lauded water industry. Mission members traveled to Israel in December 2012 and spent four days exchanging ideas, visiting water-plant sites, and meeting the industry’s top innovators with the goal of establishing a partnership between Israel and Massachusetts. David is active in many Jewish organizations, including the Jewish National Fund, Combined Jewish Philanthropies and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. David and his wife, Rabbi Leslie Gordon, have three children. After 13 years with IBM/PwC, David Zinn has joined KPMG as a partner in its financial services advisory practice in New York. He focuses on enterprise technology solutions for Fortune 500 banks, insurance companies and capital markets firms. He lives on Long Island with his wife, Eileen, and daughters Dana and Jessica. Dana will graduate from the University of Maryland this year, and Jessica will attend Syracuse University starting in the fall. David is still close with David Klyde and Steve Shikiar, as well as honorary alums Adam Tattelbaum, David Steiner and Scott Rutchick. They recently got together to celebrate Adam’s 50th birthday. Award-winning children’s book author Heidi Smith Hyde ’84, P’12, wrote “Emanuel and the Hanukkah Rescue,” her third children’s book. An adventure tale set in the 18th century, the book tells of a 9-year-old boy who stows away on a whaling ship that, after being caught in a sudden storm, is guided back to safe harbor by menorahs placed in the windows of the homes in the boy’s village. Steven Goldstein was named associate chancellor for external relations at Rutgers University, Newark, where he oversees government relations, community relations and campus communications. He had served as CEO of Garden State Equality, one of the country’s best-known statewide civil rights organizations, which he founded in 2004. The organization successfully advocated for the pioneering civil rights laws that advance equality for the LGBT community and others facing discrimination. PolitickerNJ.com has called Steven one of the most powerful people in New Jersey politics, and New Jersey Monthly ranked him as one of the state’s 101 most powerful people. Jeff Bernhardt’s book “On Sacred Ground: Jewish and Christian Clergy Reflect on Transformative Passages from the Five Books of Moses” was published last year. It is a collection of more than 100 brief essays by diverse clergy, including the first female rabbi ordained in the United States, an openly gay Orthodox rabbi, the chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Rev. Walter Cuenin (Brandeis’ Catholic chaplain). In other news, Jeff’s new play, “Therapy,” had its world premiere in Los Angeles in March.